Further reasons World War Z feels distracted and in need of a basic script edit: all the oddball details that never pay off, or are dropped completely. Gerry’s wife being British, for instance. Or the revelation from the Korean site that some people took up to 10 minutes to turn into zombies after being bitten. Or the tossed-off sentence about how “the airlines were the perfect vector” for the contagion. That hardly seems possible, since later events prove a single infected person can convert an entire planeload of people to mindless, ravening monsters in minutes, which makes it unlikely that people could have unknowingly spread the disease around the world as they do in the book. In all likelihood, the disease spread in a different form, then evolved… but why take the time to half-explain scattered bits of the story, without ever fitting them together? In the same way, the film’s setbacks generally feel half-complete. There’s a certain bitter comedy in the scientist who’s supposedly the world’s best hope dying ignominiously before actually accomplishing anything, but when his death is instantly forgotten without comment, it lacks impact. And there’s never any payoff for his speech about Mother Nature hiding her flaws as strengths, either… unless zombies’ inability to see sick people believably looks like a strength from the right angle. Much of WWZ feels like the setup to a good story, constantly being interrupted by zombie attacks.